South Africa: ANC voting going ahead after long delay

Mangaung – Results of the elections for the ANC top six positions will only be announced on Tuesday morning.

Delegates at the ANC’ s 53rd national conference are expected to start voting on Monday night, but no plenary is scheduled until the next morning, meaning that the electoral commission is not expected to announce the results before then.

The conference has now broken into commissions. There was confusion among delegates about whether the disputed Free State and North West delegations would vote on separate ballots, as proposed by the electoral commission.

Despite objections in the plenary to the proposal, which is a cautionary measure to stop all the election results being invalidated by the courts, the electoral commission decided to go ahead with different coloured ballot papers for the two provinces.

After objections were raised in the plenary to the announcement of separate ballots, electoral chairperson Mochubela Seekoe apparently acknowledged them and walked off stage, leaving delegates in doubt as to whether there would in fact be separate ballots.

Voting was delayed late into Monday night as the ballots were being printed, and is expected to continue into the early hours of the morning.